Reluctant Stewards: Journalism in a Democratic Society

Michael Schudson

MICHAEL SCHUDSON, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2012, is Professor of Journalism
at Columbia University. His publications include Why Democracies Need an Unlovable
Press (2008), The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America
(edited with David Paul Nord and Joan Shelley Rubin, 2009), and The Sociology of
News (2nd ed., 2011). His writing has also appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review,
The Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect.

Abstract: Journalists are reluctant stewards for democracy because they believe
that democracy makes citizens their own stewards. They resist donning the mantle
of moral guides on behalf of those who are authorized to guide themselves. Yet sometimes
journalists do exercise responsibility for the public good in ways that are not
subsumed under their professional duty to be nonpartisan, accurate, and fair-minded.
Examining some of these exceptions, this essay argues that journalistic stewardship
should be loosely defined, decentralized, multiform, and open to invention. In fact,
today’s economic crisis in journalism (and the identity crisis it stimulated) has
launched a new set of initiatives – from fact-checking to organized crowd-sourcing – that
have each sought to address a specific problem of democracy, truthseeking, or the
public good. Pluralism, pragmatism, and decentralized invention may do better at
stewarding democracy than a coherent philosophy of moral guardianship ever could.

Journalism, for all its occasional lofty pretensions, sits awkwardly in a discussion
about stewards of democracy. Journalism is not even supposed to be about stewardship – that
is, a kind of trusteeship or moral management suggesting that stewards, like fathers,
“know best” (with all the paternalism that this message implies). The premise of
“objective journalism” is otherwise: namely, that the citizen knows best and that
the journalist is only providing the parts – pre-cut but unfinished – for citizens to
assemble themselves. Journalists are reluctant stewards for democracy because they
believe democracy makes citizens their own stewards.

However, this philosophy of journalistic professionalism is riddled with self-deception,
as the daily practice of journalism regularly demonstrates. There is a long list
of exceptions to “just the facts” journalism, including not only disapproved exceptions –
advocacy under the guise of objectivity, say – but highly respected ones, too. These
range from avowed advocacy on the editorial page to analysis that, without endorsing
specific policy conclusions, is more substantially interpretive and context-providing
than a straightforward news story. There is also a widely shared view among mainstream
journalists that their coverage should be inclusive of women as well as men, young
as well as old, racial minorities as well as whites, and non-heterosexuals as well
as heterosexuals. Today, news organizations seek diversity in the newsroom as well
as in news coverage not to reach a larger market in quest of profit, but to realize
ideals of social justice, even though they fought the employment and advancement
of women in the 1960s and 1970s.1

Patriotism is also part of the package of exceptions. In Europe, it is commonplace
in the charters of public service broadcasting organizations to acknowledge and
affirm an obligation to serve the needs of national identity and national affiliation
even while also meeting statutory requirements to provide programming for recognized
minority populations. The BBC, at its beginning, was dedicated to promoting a sense
of “Britishness” that included celebrating a distinctively British heritage and
even an allegiance to the practices of the Church of England. Stewardship indeed!
For many Americans and for most American journalists, such an openly tutelary mission
is not only not part of their creed – it would turn their stomachs.

Still, American journalists also act in ways that express obligation to and affiliation
with the nation-state.2 When American journalists have a story they think may reveal
secrets that bear on national security, they customarily notify the government ahead
of time and even negotiate the content of the story with the White House or relevant
executive agencies. This was the case in 1961 when The New York Times got
wind of the impending Bay of Pigs invasion and voluntarily modified its story on
the strenuous urgings of the White House.3

It was again the case in 1986 when The Washington Post learned of a secret U.S.
underwater mechanism code-named “Ivy Bells” that had successfully tapped Soviet
cable communications. The Post also knew that the operation had been compromised
by the efforts of Jack Pelton, a low-level technician for the National Security
Agency (NSA) and spy who sold information to the Russians. Newsroom executives at
the Post met with NSA Director Lieutenant General William Odom, who urged them not
to publish anything. Odom contended that any story about Ivy Bells would be dangerous
to the country, revealing to the Soviets something they did not know. But they already
know, editor Ben Bradlee countered. Nevertheless, Odom said, it was unclear precisely
which Soviets knew about Ivy Bells. There might have been internal Soviet secrecy
or a cover-up. A story in the Post would set off a general alarm in the Soviet Union,
increasing Soviet anti-espionage measures – a bad outcome for the United States. Odom’s
protest was enough to make the Post cautious. Successive drafts were written, each
with less detail than the one before. Bradlee repeatedly asked his colleagues, “What
is this story’s social purpose?” In the end, the Post published the story – over the
objections of the administration – after a back and forth that lasted months.4

The Post has made similar decisions much more recently. In 2009, as editor
Marcus Brauchli recounts it, longtime investigative reporter Bob Woodward received
a copy of a confidential report produced by General Stanley McChrystal about the
war in Afghanistan. The Post informed both the Pentagon and the White House
that it planned to write about the report and to publish the complete document on
its website. The secretary of defense, national security advisor, and vice chair
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff each asked the Post to reconsider. Brauchli, in telling
this story, has said: “We should pause on that word, ‘ask.’ . . . [I]t is a curiously
American phenomenon that the most powerful officials in the world’s most powerful
country have virtually no power to do anything but ask an editor to weigh the national
interests against the impulse to publish and then leave the editor to make his decision.”5
But note that by conceding to the government the opportunity to do the asking, the
Post, as an institution, recognized obligations beyond journalism in deciding what
to publish.

These practices express a sense of stewardship with regard to the public interest –
in this case, a public good jointly guarded by the press and the government. This
coguardianship is most notable in times of war or other moments when national security
appears to be at risk. In the United States, but also in France and Britain, the
news media and the state share in what media scholars Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini
term a “national security culture” in which government officials and journalists
“both in some sense represent a common public interest” and therefore institutionalize
“relations of trust and mutual dependence.”6 During the war in Iraq, there was great
controversy among journalists about the advantages and disadvantages to fairminded
reporting brought about by the system of embedding journalists in U.S. military
combat units; but no one raised the question of whether reporters should also be
embedded with Saddam Hussein’s forces. Leading news organizations have accepted
an awkward, but notable, affiliation with their own country’s interests.

American journalism professionals understand their job to consist of publishing
news. Their professionalism resides in knowing what “news” is, or more assertively,
what “the news” is, how to locate it, how to verify it, and how to present it. Any
decisions that introduce other matters, even if they are considerations that journalists
are committed to – social justice or community pride or national security – are uncomfortable.
They complicate or pollute the purity of the journalistic task. In 2003, Dean Baquet,
who is today managing editor of The New York Times but was then managing
editor at the Los Angeles Times, was involved in a decision about whether
to publish a damaging story about Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a leading gubernatorial
candidate in California. The paper had gathered a half-dozen credible allegations
by women in the movie industry that Schwarzenegger had sexually harassed them. With
the story ready to print just days before the election, the editors wondered if
they should delay running it until after the election. Would the article not seem
to be a “hit piece” sprung on Schwarzenegger? Would the timing not make it difficult
for him to respond? Baquet later told a reporter (after the Times went
ahead and published the story): “Sometimes people don’t understand that to not publish
is a big decision for a newspaper and almost a political act. That’s not an act
of journalism. You’re letting your decision-making get clouded by things that have
nothing to do with what a newspaper is supposed to do.”7

Baquet’s is a revealing and representative statement: journalism is journalism,
not politics, and it should stick to that role. Journalism is making information
public; choosing not to publish for any reason – except, in Baquet’s view, insufficient
journalistic quality or the possibility that publishing could endanger a life – abrogates
one’s professional responsibility. How did such a view of journalism arise out of
what had been the standard assumption in nineteenth-century America (and most of
Europe) that journalism is and obviously should be a political vocation?

In 1889, Woodrow Wilson, then a political scientist at Princeton, gave an address
on the “Nature of Democracy in the United States.” He observed that popular education
for democracy did not rely only on schools. “Not much of the world, after all, goes
to school in the schoolhouse,” Wilson noted. “But through the mighty influences
of commerce and the press the world itself has become a school.” He did
not say that we live in a “globalized” society, but the implication was clear. The
newspaper press, Wilson argued,

makes men conscious of the existence and interest of affairs lying outside of the
dull round of their own daily lives. It gives them nations, instead of neighborhoods,
to look upon and think about. They catch glimpses of the international connexions
of their trades, of the universal application of law, of the endless variety of
life, of diversities of race, of a world teeming with men like themselves and yet
full of strange customs, puzzled by dim omens, stained by crime, ringing with voices
familiar and unfamiliar.

Nor did he say that we lived in an age of information abundance, but this, too,
was his belief: “And all this a man can get nowadays without stirring from home,
by merely spelling out the print that covers every piece of paper about him.”8

In 1889, the typical newspaper was closely affiliated with a political party; its
news pages, as well as its editorial page, reflected this allegiance. At the same
time, newspapers were only beginning to speak in what we would recognize today as
a distinctively journalistic voice. In a study of British journalism, media scholar
Donald Matheson finds that modern news discourse, certainly absent in 1880, was not
widespread until the 1920s. But it was not, in Matheson’s view, that putting news
in newspapers was unheard of at that time. There were not only newspapers but also
reporters. (Newspapers, or “journals,” as they were called, predate the hiring of
people to gather news; hired reporters were rare before the nineteenth century.)
Rather, it was that a newspaper in 1880 served primarily as “a collection of raw
information.” By 1930, however, it had become “a form of knowledge in itself, not
dependent on other discourses to be able to make statements about the world.”9

The Victorian newspaper was “a medley of various public styles, voices and types
of text.” Not until around 1920 did the emergence of “a journalistic discourse”
allow “the news to subsume these various voices under a universal, standard voice.”10
Journalism scholar Marcel Broersma, in a study of change in Dutch newspapers, describes
the period of the nineteenth century and up to the 1940s as an era in journalism
in which reporters had not yet accepted that their job was to “extract news from
events.” But by the mid-1940s, Broersma observes, “[r]eaders were no longer left
to draw their own conclusions; the journalist now told them what the most important
information was.”11 Modern news discourse in Holland – borrowed from British and American
models – was a mid-twentieth-century development.

The American newspaper adopted a “modern news discourse” well before the Dutch and
roughly a generation before the British, in the period from 1890 to 1910. Before
that time, the front page had a jumbled, random quality to it. Stories were composed
in a variety of voices, and news was arranged on the page (to the extent that it
was arranged at all) according to the conveyance by which items reached the paper
(“Latest by Telegraph”). Only at the turn of the twentieth century did newspapers
begin to utilize front page design – including headline size, number of columns, and
placement of stories on the page – to signal to the read- er that one item merited
attention more than another. Thus, as judgment about the significance of news items
became central to journalism, a more uniform journalistic stance and voice emerged.
At about the same time, newspapers adopted the summary lead, an opening
paragraph in each story that quickly presented the most newsworthy “who, what, when,
where, and – sometimes or by implication – why” of the story to follow.12 In the layout
of the page, the structure of the news story, and the delegation of an overwhelming
amount of the news space to the work of full-time journalists, modern news discourse
emerged.

All of this is to say that the journalism we often take to be “traditional” is only
about a century old. The notion of journalistic professionalism that has accompanied
this twentieth-century phenomenon is a strong, self-conscious commitment to a news-gathering
mission that transcends parochial allegiances and even, to some degree, national
borders. Journalistic professionalism erects partial shields against the demands
of state or source control, audience preferences, and commercial pressures. It does
not share all the major attributes of “classic” professions such as law, medicine,
and the clergy. Journalists’ professional independence is tempered by reporters’
(sometimes abject) dependence on political insiders for content. The information
that insiders provide to journalists is then relayed to the general public through
news stories about electoral contests and the operation and performance of government.
Ever present in this process is the danger that journalists will become the unpaid
public relations agents of public officials and political candidates who have the
power to turn on and off the spigots of political information. (Of course, political
news is not the only news, but it is the news most closely identified with journalism’s
democratic rationale.)

The other danger is that journalists are vulnerable not only to their sources but
to their audiences or to the drive to attract an audience. This is scarcely unknown
in other professional pursuits. Even members of the clergy want to draw a crowd
at occasions other than the christenings, marriages, funerals, and high holidays
that ensure a captive audience. To this extent, the clergy, too, are market oriented;
they strive to invent weekly services that appeal to their congregation and create
a buzz. Still, they are not answerable to boards of directors who must award shareholders
a return on their financial investments.

Further, journalists have little control over who may enter their field. They cannot
prescribe a course of study or a degree, as in law or medicine, nor do they have
mechanisms for removing members of the profession who fail to live up to professional
ethics, the way bar associations and medical societies do. So journalists are vulnerable
to the seductions of the marketplace. Their task as professionals is not to find
an audience but to find an audience without prostrating themselves before its tastes
and prejudices.

The power that sources and audiences exercise over news makes stewardship problematic
because journalists do not control their own vocational agenda. Another difficulty
is that journalists are resistant to the idea of stewardship itself. Journalists
frequently enter the field with high moral purpose along with a love of writing,
photography, or digital expression; perhaps a sense of adventure; and often an ambient
curiosity rather than a focused intensity. They also have, or develop, a pride in
their familiarity with practical life. They resist assuming too much in the way
of moral responsibility; they object to choosing a topic or adopt- ing a tone as
if they were drafting Sunday’s sermon. Journalists are determined to face facts:
New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury recalls in his memoir that he had little
use for ideas and a “fierce antagonism to ideologues.” He liked to see himself as
“a hard-hitting, two-fisted, call-them-as-they-come reporter.” Salisbury was guided
by his “Minnesota turn of mind” and his “commonsense approach.” For him, as for
so many reporters, the rule of journalism is to leave codes, doctrines, and textbooks
behind and be led by reality itself.13

This has usually meant placing a higher value on reporting than on opining. But
even opinion-spouting journalists often refuse to issue their views from Mount Olympus.
Political commentator Andrew Sullivan rejects “[t]he notion that journalists have
reputations, that we should be up on a pedestal.” “[M]aybe it’s because I am British,”
he suggests, but “I think we’re the lowest of the low. I think our job is to say
things that no one else will say and to find out things that make people very uncomfortable,
the powerful and the powerless. I think our job is not to worry about the impact
of what we find out and say but to say what we think and to report what we see.”14
Sullivan, of course, is no ordinary journalist. Equipped with a Harvard Ph.D., he
has successfully reached the public since 2000 primarily as a blogger.

Is Andrew Sullivan’s position less responsible than Marcus Brauchli’s, as discussed
above? Brauchli’s argument sounds more grown-up; he speaks as someone aware that
he is in a position to do great, even irreparable, harm to the world not only by
reporting poorly but by reporting without recognition of overarching loyalties – including
fidelity to the well-being of a polity and a political system that enables the press
to be formally and legally autonomous. Sullivan, by contrast, identifies himself
with the “lowest of the low” and revels in making trouble. Is Brauchli the parent,
Sullivan the rebellious child? Is one position better for journalism than the other?
Brauchli is the old steward of moral responsibility, even though he invokes that
obligation only at the margins – that is, only at the uncomfortable extremes where
everyday acts of reporting prove insufficient to the weight of the world on journalists’
shoulders. Sullivan speaks for everyday journalism as a truth-regarding, heat-seeking
missile for attacking ignorance and thoughtlessness.

The absence of a self-conscious and consistent philosophy of stewardship should
not be mistaken for a lack of instruction and influence. The news media describe,
define, and, to a degree, direct public life and the discourse surrounding it, whether
or not they intend to be its stewards. When golf fanatic Dwight D. Eisenhower became
president, the press routinely covered his passion for the sport. This contributed
to the sharp upturn in people’s taking up golf for the first time.15 President Jimmy
Carter was a fly fisherman. Fly-fishing grew vastly more popular after he came into
office.16 When the president sneezes, everyone thinks they have caught a cold. In
1985, when Ronald Reagan underwent surgery for colorectal cancer, the national Cancer
Information Service received an unprecedented increase in phone calls, most of them
from people seeking advice on colon cancer checkups. According to a Newsweek poll,
25 percent of adults gave thought to being tested in the days after Reagan’s cancer
became public knowledge. Five percent actually arranged to be tested – for a total
of some five to ten million doctor’s appointments!17

Culture critic Robert Hughes suggested that Ronald Reagan “left his country a little
stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies.”18 (Possibly,
he also left the country a little better protected from colorectal cancer.) And
political commentator David Bromwich wrote that Reagan’s great work was “the education
of a whole society down to his level,” not just by his precept but “by example,
simply by being who he was; day after day without blame, a president who had at
his command not a fact of history more than two weeks old.”19 Neither Hughes nor
Bromwich adduce any evidence for their assessments. But their critical remarks have
a clear plausibility. If media coverage of presidents can stimulate the sale of
golf clubs or fishing rods, if it can draw millions to accept the unpleasantness
of a colonoscopy – all simply by reporting everyday facts about presidents – then it
is easy to believe that Reagan, repeatedly willing, without qualms, to pass off
movie-based anecdotes for actual historical events, taught dubious civics lessons
about truthfulness simply by having his behaviors transcribed by the press for public
transmission.

But these are cases of influence rather than stewardship – specifically, influences
that derive from the subjects journalists cover and the sources they rely on. Here,
the journalists serve as messengers, not stewards. But do journalists – and should
they – seek to inflect this influence in one way or another? Should they choose their
sources and subjects with some self-conscious ends in view? And can this be done
without taking on the arrogant presumption that they are in a position to “elevate”
their audiences? Or is that presumption arrogant? Might it be the appropriate stewardly
office of a profession in the teaching, coaching, or counseling business of public
information?

The question is not whether the press stewards or fails to, but what sort of stewardship
and philosophy of stewardship best serve a democratic society – particularly this
democratic society, with its resistance to government “intrusion” inherited from
the nation’s founders but exacerbated and exaggerated in the post- Reagan era. Let
me propose three general principles for stewardship in the media: First, stewardship
should be exercised in moderation; it should be a stewardship of loose reins. Second,
stewardship should be decentralized and multiform, more a set of practices seeking
to enhance a usefully vague sense of democracy than a set of guiding ideals based
on a clearly articulated philosophy of the functional location of news in a democratic
culture. Third, at rare but critical junctures, journalism cannot and should not
give up what has been called “social trustee professionalism” for “expert professionalism,”
but it must acknowledge that it is suspended awkwardly between them.20 That is,
as necessary as a focused professionalism is most of the time, it is not sufficient
all of the time. Vital as professionalism is in guiding news practice ordinarily,
it is not an adequate refuge in those moments when journalists face threats to transcendent
values of democracy, human rights, public safety, and an accountability to future
generations.

For the news media, there is a rationale for a tempered, practice-centered approach
to institutional responsibility. This includes that journalists are, and should
be, messengers of the views of others as much as or more than they are conveyers
of their own views. In other words, the temptation to report uncritically the statements
of public officials or political candidates is difficult to distinguish cleanly from
the responsibility to report appropriately, and with some deference, what these
democratically elected persons or aspirants to election have to say.

Certainly, various fields oblige the professional to convey the message of some higher
authority; thus, one may criticize “activist judges” for substituting their personal
or political positions for the letter of the law or the weight of a line of precedents.
But in most cases that reach an appellate court, neither “the letter of the law”
nor precedent communicates a message that has only one plausible reading. Judges
must interpret the law. In a sense, then, every appellate judge is an activist judge.
Otherwise, they could all be replaced with a good algorithm. Still, some judicial
interventions are more inbounds than others; some show more integrity than others
in making a good-faith effort to read the law in keeping with the highest (vague)
ideals of justice and the (less vague but still disputable) weight and direction
of past decisions. For journalists, a similar issue arises when a straightforward,
fair-minded account of, say, a speech by a public official or candidate for office
holds democratic value in itself. In this respect, it is not that journalists are
bending to politicians – but that they are bowing to the idea and practice of democratic
politics. Other things equal, this is itself a vital service that news provides
democracy.

Journalists have long worked on the knife edge between accepted professionalism
on one side and pure amateurism on the other. But the delicacy of this position
has grown in the past decade with remarkable advances in what amateur or “citizen”
journalists can contribute. As professionals, journalists have the obligations of
trusteeship to an accumulated set of traditions and values. As practitioners in
a field where amateurs, with little or no training or experience, make notable contributions,
it is clear that they are artisans of the public discourse, not magicians operating
with recondite knowledge. They may merit public respect and gratitude for their
experience, talent, craft, and sometimes astonishing courage, but not for having
mastered an arcane language as scientists have, or for having gained knowledge of
the secret and sacred interior of the human body as doctors have, or for having
been entrusted with the design of bridges or canals or skyscrapers as engineers
and architects have, or having acquired a command of relatively esoteric lore of
case law as judges and attorneys have. They have attained only a sense, often hard
won, of what ingredients belong in that casserole of public significance, popular
interest, immediate currency, and departure from the commonplace called news.

In practice, journalists frequently go beyond this craft knowledge to feel obligations
to some ideal or authority higher than outdoing a rival, winning a more desirable
audience, or pleasing their journalistic peers. But just what is that elusive higher
authority? An allegiance to the public good? What do journalists know of that? That
is, on what grounds do they presume to know more than others do? Or is the higher
authority democracy? But what do journalists know of democracy that is unknown to
ordinary mortals? Or is truth their ultimate objective? What do they know of truth
that the rest of us do not?

Simply asking such questions has often been sufficient to resettle the conversation
around the premise that journalism is just a trade, not a profession, and should
not promise more than it can deliver. But skepticism about journalism’s pretensions
to professionalism has to some extent been put aside in the past decade as journalism
organizations have been forced to cut newsroom jobs – by about a third – by the advent
of the Internet, new possibilities for citizen journalism, the surplus of available
information, the turning away of younger audiences from print newspapers and conventional
TV news, and the huge loss of print advertising to Craigslist, eBay, Monster.com,
and other independent websites. In many news organizations, there has been a powerful
sense that, if they are not quite at death’s door, they should nonetheless start
shopping for long-term care insurance.21

These troubles for the news industry have
fostered serious consideration of just what journalism’s core mission is, precisely
what it contributes to democratic society, and exactly what, if anything, full-time
professional journalists contribute that unpaid amateurs cannot. This reflection – there
being no Supreme Court of journalism – has not produced any definitive statements.
Given not only the nature of journalism but the extraordinary new opportunities
to create on a shoestring budget news-gathering and news-disseminating organizations
of consequence, the best response to journalism’s crisis has not come primarily
from guiding essays or books, although they have had their place; rather, it has
been found in the practical creation of entirely new news organizations by professional
journalists young and old and by a radical reshaping of some leading old news organizations.
These initiatives are a serious, if decentralized and not yet well recognized, response
to the “stewardship” problem, as I will try to show here.

What is the core mission of journalism to which its ethics should be oriented and
whose endangerment should raise public concern? Answers to this question have taken
several forms in recent years. One formulation is watchdog journalism,
a term that appeared in books in the early 1960s, was not seen again until the late
1970s, and rose into much wider use only in the 1990s. A similar term, accountability
journalism (or accountability reporting), first surfaced around
1970, rose sharply by 1980, declined, and then shot up again in the 1990s.22

I first noticed this second term in Leonard Downie, Jr., and Robert G. Kaiser’s The
News About the News (2002), in which the authors, both of The Washington
Post, link journalism to America’s “culture of accountability.”23 Downie and Kaiser
use accountability reporting to refer to the kind of journalism American
communities deserve – but do not get enough of.24 In Losing the News (2009), Alex
S. Jones, former New York Times reporter and now director of the Shorenstein
Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues that there is an “iron core” of news
reporting that all else in journalism – editorials, opinion columns, and news analysis – depends
on. And that core is “what is sometimes called ‘accountability news,’ because it
is the form of news whose purpose is to hold government and those with power accountable.”
Sometimes called the “news of verification,” this “fact-based accountability news
is the essential food supply of democracy.”25 And we may be starved for it, particularly
at the local level, as Paul Starr and others have forcefully suggested.26

Journalism, as these authors acknowledge, has never been single-mindedly devoted
to its watchdog role, and I do not think that it should be. Journalism serves democracy
in a variety of ways: providing citizens information-centered political news, offering
political analysis, undertaking investigative reporting, presenting “social empathy”
stories that – often in a human-interest vein – inform citizens about neighbors and
groups they may not know or understand, providing a location for public conversation,
attending to how representative democracies work, and mobilizing citizens for political
life by advocating candidates, policies, and viewpoints.27

Some of these functions – notably, analysis, investigative reporting, and social-empathy
coverage – have been better served by the news media since about 1970 than at any
prior time in our history. Leading news organizations have come to accept that transmitting
“just the facts” of the day’s events should not be the exclusive task that journalism
takes on. In a study in progress, Katherine Fink and I have found that in 1955,
conventional “who, what, when, where” stories made up 91 percent of front page stories
in a sample from The New York Times, but they made up only 49 percent by
2003. Figures for The Washington Post and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
are similar. Over this time period, we also observed a large increase in analytical,
or contextual, reporting.

It is also of note that one of the traditional functions of journalism in democracies –
mobilization – speaks in praise of partisanship, whose reemergence, particularly on
cable television, has caused considerable consternation – more than I think is merited.
It would be devastating if advocacy journalism replaced accountability reporting,
but that is not what has happened. I cannot say that the conservative drumbeat of
some of the most popular shows on Fox News – much like the tone of conservative radio
talk shows that frightened many people in the 1980s – leaves me untroubled. But I
see no principled objection to it. Partisanship deserves a place at the table in
print, television, radio, and online media. Opinion journalism is not only growing
but, at its best – like contextual reporting at its best – deserves praise. In the first
serious sociological study of what the authors call “the space of opinion” in journalism,
Ronald Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley argue that even explicitly – and often obnoxiously – opinionated
commentary stimulates public attention to political affairs and political participation
when people have reliably opinionated figures – Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow, George
Will or Paul Krugman – to love or hate. According to Jacobs and Townsley, positing
that public opinion is and should be formed on a “rational information model” oversimplifies
a complex process; if we instead accepted a “cultural model of complex democracy,”
then we could acknowledge that various media formats may serve the public good.
We could then see that “drama, disagreement, and strategic communication do not
necessarily undermine democratic deliberation.”28 In fact, Jacobs and Townsley suggest,
these often denigrated features of opinion journalism sometimes have proven superior
to more conventional news shows, particularly on television. Specifically, in their
content analysis of programs from the early 1990s and the early 2000s, Hannity &
Colmes (Fox News) did a better job than The NewsHour (PBS) or
Face the Nation (CBS) in challenging the high-level political officials
that were interviewed.29

But isn’t opinion dangerous, especially when so many people are easily confused
about what separates opinion from fact? Even if we agree that individuals are entitled
to their own opinions, isn’t it crucial to assert that they are not entitled to
their own facts? While I can agree with this, I also wonder what we can do about
it except to hope that sunlight is indeed a good disinfectant. True, people have
easy access to misinformation, whether about global warming or President Obama’s
religion or birthplace, but this is hardly without precedent in less technologically
remarkable times. It was in 1965, not yesterday, that historian Richard Hofstadter
wrote his account of “the paranoid style” in American politics, which he characterized
as “overheated, oversuspicious, over-aggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic.”30

In practical terms, efforts to make journalism serve the public good in the age
of databases, digital media, and cable television have been taken up in different,
often imaginative, ways. First, an emphasis on truth-telling – that is, the policing
of publicly relevant lies, spins, and misdirections issued by political figures themselves –
has led in recent years to the creation of “fact-checking” news organizations or
fact-checking departments within existing news organizations. These influential
efforts have defined new venues and systematic procedures for holding accountable
both governmental leaders and those who aspire to elective political office.

Second, others in journalism have been less interested in pruning misinformation
from politicians’ remarks than in getting behind the discourse of the day through
the tough-slogging, often months-long (or longer) investigations of powerful public
or private entities – work that is generally termed investigative reporting.

Third, news organizations have been established with the primary, or even the exclusive,
intention of making up for specific shortfalls in political news coverage, particularly
at the local level.

Fourth, experiments are under way to provide more and better interpretation and
in-depth news analysis, to present it in more compelling ways, and to find means
to help audiences visualize complex materials.

Fifth, there is increasing acceptance of the idea that stewardship can be practiced
in concert with, not merely for the benefit of, media audiences. The shepherd’s flock
may be co-shepherds; the management’s charges may be enlisted as co-managers; and
for journalists, the “people formerly known as the audience,” in media critic Jay
Rosen’s memorable phrase, can produce news content themselves. Stewardship in a
self-consciously egalitarian culture is inherently unstable. There are ways, now
powerfully reinforced by digital technologies, to approach this reality not as an
impediment but as a workable new tool for professional journalism.

Sixth, journalistic functions are less confined than ever before to organizations
that are identified primarily as news organizations. Human rights organizations report
news, too. Polling organizations work with – or independently of – news organizations
to produce newsworthy results on a regular basis.

Let me discuss each of these points a bit further, because in the past decade these
efforts to hold journalism to a higher standard than simple (in principle, not necessarily
in implementation) nonpartisanship or objectivity have given rise to significant
journalistic innovations. The innovators are, if you will, practical philosophers,
inventing notable responses to a crisis of journalistic legitimacy that is shaking
the profession they thought they were a part of or hoped to enter. The result, although
it has not yet stood the test of time, may be a pluralistic set of stewardships
that are healthier, as a team, than “traditional” journalism proved to be in its
single-minded – and stale – style of reluctant stewardship.

Policing Truthfulness in Political Discourse. Consider the rise and spread
of so-called fact-checking organizations, usually traced to efforts beginning in
the 1990s to police campaign rhetoric in TV advertising, speech-making, and candidate
debates. The roots of organized fact-checking have something to do with a major
shift in presidential political campaigning – while campaigning previously involved
events and addresses that candidates hoped would generate “free media” (that is,
news coverage), together with door-to-door work by volunteers, there is now a preponderant
emphasis and substantial financial investment in television advertising.

Some fact-checking organizations are avowedly partisan – liberal groups seeking to
fact-check conservatives, conservative groups fact-checking liberals. These groups
are significant, but they do not claim to salute the flag of professional journalism.
Others do. These include Factcheck.org, the earliest (2003) enduring nonpartisan
fact-checking operation, which is largely supported by the Annenberg Foundation
and sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pensylvania.
The website PolitiFact.com began in 2007 as a project of The St. Petersburg Times
and its Washington bureau chief Bill Adair. It has since spun off eleven state-level
PolitiFact operations. Also in 2007, The Washington Post launched The Fact
Checker, a blog (and a column in the print edition) that focused on the 2008 presidential
campaign. The project ended in 2008 and was reorganized with a much more general
focus in early 2011.

These and other organizations take “truth” very seriously. PolitiFact scores politicians’
statements on its “Truth-O-Meter” as “true,” “mostly true,” “half true,” “mostly
false,” “false,” or “pants on fire.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker
scores politicians’ statements on a scale from zero to four “Pinocchios.” These
initiatives recognize that they do not have direct access to truth; the self-mocking
humor of their scoring systems emphasizes this. They also publish not only their
conclusions but what sources they consulted and how they arrived at their judgments.
In this respect, they are more forthcoming about their journalistic process than
conventional news organizations. They are thereby implicitly offering a somewhat
refined and revised model of what journalism can and should be. Far from abandoning
a professional commitment to objectivity, fact-checking organizations are embracing
that obligation and taking it further than news organizations generally do. In “showing
their work,” as math teachers say, professional fact-checkers not only advertise
how thorough they are but “acknowledge their own imperfection as arbiters of truth,
without relinquishing their faith in and commitment to objectivity.”31

Constructing New Communities of Investigative Journalism. In 2009, a group
of organizations focused on investigative reporting joined together to form the
Investigative News Network (inn). The group initially included about a dozen organizations.
It now counts over sixty organizations among its membership. To become a member,
organizations must be nonprofits. They must be transparent about their donors and
disclose names of anyone who donates $1,000 or more. They must be nonpartisan, as
defined by their commitment to producing investigative or public interest reporting
“that is not based upon, influenced by or supportive of the interests or policies
of (i) any single political party or political viewpoint or (ii) any single religion
or religious viewpoint.” In short, these organizations, a majority of which were
founded in the past five years, take their identity as professional journalism organizations
very seriously, devoting the lion’s share of their attention (if not their exclusive
attention) to investigative reporting.

Not all nonprofit news organizations are inn members. Nor are all new news organizations
that focus on investigative reporting nonprofits. The celebrated for-profit TalkingPointsMemo
has won national awards for its investigations; it also operates from an avowedly
left-liberal perspective. But there are at least seventy- five nonprofit news publishers
today, most of them focusing on investigative journalism, and most of them begun
in the past half-dozen years. The majority are small; at least a dozen have annual
budgets under $100,000, which means that they operate on “‘sweat equity,’ heart
and hope,” as Charles Lewis and colleagues put it. Together, they employ seven hundred
people and have a total annual budget of $92 million.32

The INN member organizations are committed to journalism in the public interest,
not to liberalism or conservatism or any other political creed. Most of them are
small and therefore potentially vulnerable to, say, a libel suit or the threat of
one. This is one reason that inn arranges group libel insurance for members.

Reinventing Local News Coverage. The Voice of San Diego, an online news
organization focused exclusively on issues of government and economy in San Diego
and staffed by a dozen young journalists, was launched in 2005. Since then, local
or regional start-ups (including the Texas Tribune, for example), all with
slim budgets and low-cost, online operations, have been making up for the loss of
“core” reporting capacity at hundreds of news organizations around the country.
Can they do the job? Time will tell. No one knows if philanthropic organizations
will be able or willing to sustain them indefinitely, and many are seeking to broaden
their funding base. But their laser focus on core journalism means that they do
not need to hire a movie reviewer or a sports staff, a lifestyle reporter or a local-color
columnist. They are not all-purpose, general publications; they are special-purpose-politics
and economy oriented. They have even found ways to write stories that require no
writing: Texas Tribune routinely publishes the list of the highest salaries on the
state payroll in Texas. No commentary is required when you can quickly show just
how many millions of state taxpayer dollars go straight to the bank accounts of
football coaches and assistant football coaches at the state’s public universities.

Looking for Comparative Advantage in Analysis. Not all efforts to rethink
the core functions of journalism take place at online start-ups. At the end of 2011,
the Associated Press (AP) announced a new strategy in a memo that senior managing
editor Michael Oreskes sent to the organization’s three thousand journalists around
the world. A 150-year-old cooperative owned by its many member newspapers, the AP
is celebrated for its massive reach, its comprehensive coverage, and its capacity
to be on top of more breaking news more quickly than any other news organization
anywhere. But this news, even when the AP has broken a story exclusively or hours
or minutes ahead of the next news organization, is quickly taken up by scores of
other news outlets. What the AP needs, Oreskes argues, is to transform its reporting
into “work with a longer shelf life.” He has given this approach a slogan-like title:
“The New Distinctiveness.” He suggests a variety of approaches under this rubric,
but one in particular gives the flavor of the policy: that is, the AP will launch
a “running ‘container’ that can be used anywhere.” Called “Why It Matters,” this
feature is meant to “focus our daily journalism on relevance without sacrificing
depth.” Nothing in the proposal, Oreskes insists, is “a product” so much as “an
ever-growing toolbox of approaches.”33

Incorporating Crowds into Serving Journalism’s Core Mission. London’s Guardian
newspaper; ProPublica, the New York-based online investigative reporting organization
established in 2009; and National Public Radio, by way of the Public Insight Network
that Minnesota Public Radio launched in 2008: all have found distinctive ways to
incorporate the insights and information of hundreds of thousands of nonprofessionals
into their own labors. One could call these unpaid volunteers “ordinary citizens,”
but that is not necessarily accurate. Sometimes they are engaged because they have
time to examine bits of publicly available data and contribute their insight to
masses of material that would overwhelm any news organization if their own staffers
had to take it all upon themselves. In other situations, it is not untutored eyes
that are being enlisted but specific and distinctive backgrounds and skills; that
is the novelty of the Public Insight Network. Citizen journalism, or “user-generated
content,” in some respects competes with professional journalism, but at the same
time it serves as an enormously productive new resource that can be part of a collaboration
with full-time, paid professional journalists. For some journalists, the surveillance
of their work by audiences who voice their opinions is stunning and important. “I
have 1.4 million fact checkers,” writes blogger Andrew Sullivan. “Within seconds
if I get the spelling wrong of some Latin word I will get three emails . . . That
relationship, I think, is why I believe that online journalism blogging contains
within it a revival of citizen journalism in a way that can bring truth back to
a discourse.”34

Accepting the Legitimacy of Non-Journalism Accountability Organizations.
The present moment seems to call on journalism and its affiliated organizations – including
journalism schools and journalism prizes – to accept into the circle of news-reporting
organizations other information - gathering methods and opinion statements about
public life directed to broad publics. By acknowledging the work of other accountability
organizations, journalists can help make democracy work as part of their professional
world. It is a very good thing that Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded to online
news organizations. It might be good if the expert reporting of an advocacy organization
like Human Rights Watch were also recognized. The inside-the-Beltway and beyond-the-
Beltway advocacy groups that have outdone the federal government itself in making
federal databases more searchable and accessible also belong in the ongoing reformation
of a journalistic self-image. Journalism has never been able to draw sharp boundaries
around itself to keep insiders and outsiders neatly delineated, nor should it. But
it is one thing not to put up fences and another to invite the new neighbors over
for coffee.

Could the media do better in serving democratic ends? Yes, of course. But this is
only in part because they fall short of their ideals or fail to accept the responsibilities
of stewardship; it is also because journalism’s common understandings of democratic
ideals fall short themselves. A better journalism might be possible if journalists
had a more sophisticated sense of what it means to serve democratic ends. It is
more than providing citizens with the information they need to make sound decisions
in the voting booth. That is one key feature of what journalism should provide,
but it is only one part; and this information-centered model foreshortens the obligations
of journalism with respect to citizenship. Journalism can serve democracy by providing
political information to help inform voters before they head to the polls, but journalism’s
role in serving democracy extends beyond this. It can also offer an understanding
of the democratic process that might help educate people about what democracy entails
and what reasonably can be expected of it (for instance, an appreciation of the
value of compromise or an understanding of the gaps between rhetoric, legislation,
and implementation); it can display compelling portraits of persons, groups, and
problems in society that are not on the current political agenda at all; it can
make available forums for public discussion; it can provide analysis, context,
and interpretation for understanding events of the day; and, yes, it can offer partisan
frameworks for interpreting news in a way designed to stimulate and mobilize people
for specific political objectives.35

Widely shared views of good journalism typically tell us that the press should cover
issues in campaigns and not devote so much attention to the “horse race” aspects
of elections – but that may be the wrong approach. The horse race is part of what
excites people about politics and therefore has the potential to intrigue them,
later, in the “issues.” Prevailing views further suggest that good journalism seeks
in-depth analysis rather than quick coverage of every last accident, scandal, and
mishap. This may be wrong, too; maybe “pretty good” analysis “quickly,” as Dean
of the Columbia Journalism School Nicholas Lemann puts it, is as important, if not
more. A corollary is that long-form journalism is better than short-form, but even
this may be an error: part of the progress of journalism over the past century is
the greater skill of journalists in simplification – “data visualization,” if you will – and
taking on the burden of interpretation and analysis in a quick, rather than studied,
way. It may also be that the shift we have witnessed in recent decades away from
covering government itself does more to foster features of good citizenship than
a preoccupation with government. And it provides an opening for social-empathy reporting
that informs us about some neighbor or group of neighbors, often suffering visibly
or silently from some personal or social or political ill fortune, that we would
not know about otherwise.36 Finally, it may even be that efforts to cater to the
marketplace sometimes serve the public good better than efforts to fashion news
as a type of pedagogy in which elites who “know best” work to educate the untutored
masses. Without idealizing either the general public or the logic of the marketplace,
sometimes the aggregated desires and interests of millions prove a better guide
to what matters than the views of the professionals.

I do not mean to argue that the press that stewards least stewards best. However,
I think that the news media have grown as institutional stewards of democratic citizenship
by adapting: they were once organizations of elites speaking to elites, and then
became for a long time political parties speaking through the newspapers to their
own troops, and then emerged in an original blend of commercial organization and
professional pride. And now, when the leading institutions of professional news-gathering
are buffeted by gale-force winds in every direction, and when “professionalism”
itself is under scrutiny, journalism is nowhere close to a clearly articulated understanding
of its plan and purpose in democracy. And that, we need to understand, may be exactly
right for us. It gives play to journalism. It offers running room for new ideas
and projects – woefully undercapitalized as many of them are – to find audiences, to
impassion young (and older) journalists, and to teach the grand thinkers of public
life that there just might be a few new things under the sun.